Interactive media (e.g., the Internet) has great potential for improving the targeting of advertisements (“ads”) to receptive audiences. For example, some websites provide information search functionality that is based on keywords entered by the user seeking information. This user query can be an indicator of the type of information of interest to the user. By comparing the user query to a list of keywords specified by an advertiser, it is possible to provide targeted ads to the user. An example of such a system is AdWords™ offered by Google, Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.).
Another form of online advertising is ad syndication, which allows advertisers to extend their marketing reach by distributing contextual ads to additional partners. For example, third party online publishers can place an advertiser's text or image ads on web properties with desirable content to drive online customers to the advertiser's website. An example of such a system is AdSense™ offered by Google Inc.
In contextual advertising systems (e.g., AdSense™), ads are selected and served by automated systems based on the content displayed by the user in, for example, a browser window. The displayed content is analyzed to determine the “context” of the page (e.g., the main topic), so that ads that best match the context can be targeted to the web page. In contextual advertising systems such as AdSense, once the context of a content page is matched to a set of potential advertisements for display, an auction mechanism is used to select one or more potential advertisements to actually appear on the page. In this manner, a small subset of advertisements that can potentially appear on any particular relevant content page actually do appear on each web page.
When a member of the advertising audience (hereinafter referred to as a “viewer” or “user” without loss of generality) views one of the ads (such as when a page of content including the ad is displayed and/or rendered to the audience member), that is deemed to be an “impression” of the ad. The reasons the advertisements are not displayed are not typically presented to the advertiser associated with the advertisements, therefore, advertisers do not know how to improve their ads.